International women’s conference in form of talk show: impressing visitors of the Islamic Cultural Center in Kiev

The International Women’s Conference “Traditional Values and Contemporary Challenges”, undertook by the Public Organization “Mariyam”, was held on Saturday, March 13, 2013.

More than 150 guests from across Ukraine and other countries, men and women, gathered on the ground floor of the Kiev Islamic Cultural Center. They included special guests, Mrs. Kamila Salpagarova from the Charitable Foundation “Solidarity” (Russia), Mrs. Tatiyana Suchkova, head of the All-Ukrainian Public Organization “Detstvo” (Childhood), Mrs. Maya Zakut, head of the women’s department at the Arab House in Ukraine, a delegation of the Women’s Muslim League from Moldova, and reporters from the Iranian TV channel IRIN.

The guests welcome with much enthusiasm the new format of the event: the organizers turned it into a talk show where each subject was highlighted in conversation with the mediator (which was a woman) and not read as a report. This evolved live response from the visitors who were showing compassion, agreement, disagreement, objection, and commented everything that happened.

Subject for consideration was not only woman’s role in the contemporary society and her enhanced contributions in the social life, but burning issues such as protection of family from divorce, rational use of one’s time, adoption of a child in keeping with the Ukrainian legislation and Shariah norms.

Fundament for peace and pillar for trust

Mrs. Tatiyana Suchkova points out that happy childhood can be provided for one’s children only when the mother is a strong and developed personality. She made reference to the words in welcoming addresses of Mrs. Maya Zakut and Num Bargut that when a nation lives in times of crises it only depends on the woman if next generations grow up in goodness (worthy to be called its sons). The harder are living condition of a nation, the heavier is the burden put on fragile shoulders of the mothers.

Contacts with one’s children should not be set by prohibitions or control, but through fostering trustful relations with them. It’s not easy, as tremendous endurance would be required if one is not intended to turn one’s relations with the child into showing off one’s power over him. Instead, one should be able to hear and understand if even the child is wrong, and to back the child when considering the situation. The purpose “to punish” should never occur, because a child needs friendly advice on how things can be corrected, or, at least, how the consequence of his mistake can be mitigated.
 When there’s no trust, it’s meaningless to spy the child’s pages in social networks, inspect his phone or trace his routs; because in a time the child will nevertheless learn to hide information from you.

Leaning to control oneself and one’s time

 “If even little flame occurs in your house (God forbid), will you seat still waiting it to fade away? Or will you say that “I will choke it afterward”? Or will you take a nice lighter and kindle it only because your lighter is nice and good? Or you will rush to choke it unless it turns into fire and reduce your house to ashes?” – Mrs. Vera Fryndak asks the audience.

Her advice is that one should do one’s best to keep away from throwing out family conflicts on children, from engaging relatives and friends in family conflicts, from trying to reproach each other as painfully as possible; instead, one should seat and discuss controversial points with the other one in a clear and calm manner. It’s important that one should be careful about one’s intention: instead of humiliating the other one and making him/her feel guilty, one should settle controversial issues and preserve the family.

Mrs. Tatiyana Yastremskaya spoke about a problem that is important for each person of today, “how to do it all in time” and informed several methods for rational use of time.  She says: “It’s very important that instead of dedication to business matters one spares time for relaxation as well”.

Volunteer work: changing the surrounding world

The effectiveness of this statement was shown by Mrs. Kamila Salpagarova from Moscow by case of her Charitable Foundation “Solidarity”. It’s a foundation created by Muslims who are united by the ideas of goodness and mercy. It helps poor families with chronically ill children and orphans in fighting the hard material and psychological conditions.

The key to their success is in the human care, as without engagement of great many volunteers who keep calling, writing, asking about what kind of help they can offer in a project or asking for a work to do, the foundation performance would not be so successful. Many large-scale projects would fail, because if even each staff member would work nights and days, he or she would be physically incapable to do everything in due time.

Orphan needs family and truth about his/her origin

Orphan guardianship, according to the Islamic religious teaching, is a matter of high merit but not lesser responsibility. The majority of people, when speaking about taking orphan to family, mean family adoption. But adoption, according to the current Ukrainian legislation, has great many implications that are impermissible according to Shariah. Thus, a child breaks the link with his/her blood relatives, his/her name and surname and even place of birth can be changed, he/she cannot learn the truth about his/her origin and may have incestuous marriage in future…

A more acceptable form is orphan guardianship (if a child is younger than 14) or sponsorship (if a child is 14 to 18 years old). Yet, it doesn’t relieve one from constrains related to dressing or privacy, once the puberty age is reached, with adopting family members of opposite gender.  In case of baby’s guardianship this problem is solved by setting milk kinship, which requires five separate feedings (sucklings). Only few are aware that breast-feeding will be possible for a woman who has never have a baby, if she prepares her breasts in a proper way, and that there’s a website devoted to breast-feeding of adopted children.

Live contacts and free literature

Once the conference was over the guests could talk tete-a-tete with speakers that they were interested in, asking questions concerning them. Also, they could exchange opinions with other listeners with a cup of flavorous tea and sweets and add their home library with free literature published by “Alraid” and the Public Organization “Ansar Foundation”. Each participant could select books and brochures that were interesting for him/her.